Revision as of 10:04, 21 December 2011

Contents

Description

Brighton Robotics, in conjunction with BuildBrighton, have been asked to put on an event in collaboration with Bristol Dorkbot for the dConstruct conference. The event will be held on Wednesday 2nd September at The Skiff and will consist of an 'exhibition' of members projects plus the unveiling of a new group project that Brigton Robotics and BuildBrighton will have created together. After discussion we have decided to make some Cockroach Swarm Bots. These little bots will display the following behaviors in an environment with several bright lights and some shady and covered areas using simple subsumption architecture:

Light Seeking

Obstacle Avoidance

Listening for Loud Noise

If a loud noise is detected the following behavior will subsume the standard:

Light Avoiding (causes bots to scuttle away into darkness)

Obstacle Avoidance (allows bots to avoid each other in their flight)

When in darkest place, stop and wait for random period of time till 'danger' has passed

Schematic

In this schematic I've included the values for the resistors and capacitors that I used on my board. The circuit is tolerant of a wide range of values. The resistors used for the pull ups on the switches should work with values from 100 Ohms up to and above 1 Mega Ohm. The capacitors as well, which are used to de-bounce the switch, should work with values from 0.1nF (100pF) and up.

Here is a breadboard instruction for the circuit. This was done for the last hack night so does not include the capacitors.

Parts

Sketches

There are two sketches provided the first is simply a test load that you can use to check that you have built the robot correctly. The second provides a standard implemntation that can be loaded into many robots for a demo. This sketch can be modified by each builder (to add different timings or a multi-coloured LED for instance).